“What out of my system?”

“Whatever it is that’s in there.”

“Never mind about my system. How come you wouldn’t stay at the mission when you got an invite?”

“I don’t want their charity.”

“You ate their soup.”

“I did not. All I had was coffee. Anyway, I don’t like Chester. He doesn’t like Catholics.”

“Catholics don’t like Methodists. What the hell, that’s even. And I don’t see any Catholic missions down here. I ain’t had any Catholic soup lately.”

“I won’t do it and that’s that.”

“So freeze your ass someplace. Your flower’s froze already.”

“Let it freeze.”

“You sang a song at least.”

“Yes I did. I sang while Sandra was dying.”

“She’da died no matter. Her time was up.”

“No, I don’t believe that. That’s fatalism. I believe we die when we can’t stand it anymore. I believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can, and Sandra decided she could die.”

“I don’t fight that. Die when you can. That’s as good a sayin’ as there is.”

“I’m glad we agree on something,” Helen said.

“We get along all right. You ain’t a bad sort.”

“You’re all right too.”

“We’re both all right,” Francis said, “and we ain’t got a damn penny and noplace to flop. We on the bum. Let’s get the hell up to Jack’s before he puts the lights out on us.”

Helen slipped her arm inside Francis’s. Across the street Aldo Campione and Dick Doolan, who in the latter years of his life was known as Rowdy Dick, kept silent pace.

o o o

Helen pulled her arm away from Francis and tightened her collar around her neck, then hugged herself and buried her hands in her armpits.

“I’m chilled to my bones,” she said.

“It’s chilly, all right.”

“I mean a real chill, a deep chill.”

Francis put his arm around her and walked her up the steps of Jack’s house. It stood on the east side of Ten Broeck Street, a three-block street in Arbor Hill named for a Revolutionary War hero and noted in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where a dozen of the city’s arriviste lumber barons lived, all in a row, in competitive luxury. For their homes the barons built handsome brownstones, most of them now cut into apartments like Jack’s, or into furnished rooms.

The downstairs door to Jack’s opened without a key. Helen and Francis climbed the broad walnut staircase, still vaguely elegant despite the threadbare carpet, and Francis knocked. Jack opened the door and looked out with the expression of an ominous crustacean. With one hand he held the door ajar, with the other he gripped the jamb.

“Hey Jack,” Francis said, “we come to see ya. How’s chances for a bum gettin’ a drink?”

Jack opened the door wider to look beyond Francis and when he saw Helen he let his arm fall and backed into the apartment. Kate Smith came at them, piped out of a small phonograph through the speaker of the radio. The Carolina moon was shining on somebody waiting for Kate. Beside the phonograph sat Clara, balancing herself on a chamber pot, propped on all sides with purple throw pillows, giving her the look of being astride a great animal. A red bedspread covered her legs, but it had fallen away at one side, revealing the outside of her naked left thigh, visible to the buttocks. A bottle of white fluid sat on the table by the phonograph, and on a smaller table on her other side a swinging rack cradled a gallon of muscatel, tiltable for pouring. Helen walked over to Clara and stood by her.

“Golly it’s cold for this time of year, and they’re calling for snow. Just feel my hands.”

“This happens to be my home,” Clara said hoarsely, “and I ain’t about to feel your hands, or your head either. I don’t see any snow.”

“Have a drink,” Jack said to Francis.

“Sure,” Francis said. “I had a bowl of soup about six o’clock but it went right through me. I’m gonna have to eat somethin’ soon.”

“I don’t care whether you eat or not,” Jack said.

Jack went to the kitchen and Francis asked Clara: “You feelin’ better?”

“No.”

“She’s got the runs,” Helen said.

“I’ll tell people what I got,” Clara said.

“She lost her husband this week,” Jack said, returning with two empty tumblers. He tilted the jug and half-filled both.

“How’d you find out?” Helen said.

“I saw it in the paper today,” Clara said.

“I took her to the funeral this morning,” Jack said. “We got a cab and went to the funeral home. They didn’t even call her.”

“He didn’t look any different than when I married him.”

“No kiddin’,” Francis said.

“Outside of his hair was snow-white, that’s all.”

“Her kids were there,” Jack said.

“The snots,” Clara said.

“Sometimes I wonder what if I run off or dropped dead,” Francis said. “Helen’d probably go crazy.”

“Why if you dropped dead she’d bury you before you started stinkin’, “ Jack said. “That’s all’d happen.”

“What a heart you have,” Francis said.

“You gotta bury your dead,” Jack said.

“That’s a rule of the Catholic church,” said Helen.

“I’m not talkin’ about the Catholic church,” Francis said.

“Anyway, now she’s a single girl,” Jack said, “I’m gonna find out what Clara’s gonna do.”

“I’m gonna go right on livin’ normal,” Clara said.

“Normal is somethin’,” Francis said. “What the hell is normal anyway, is what I’d like to know. Normal is cold. Goddamn it’s cold tonight. My fingers. I rubbed myself to see if I was livin’. You know, I wanna ask you one question.”

“No,” Clara said.

“You said no. Whataya mean no?”

“What’s he gonna ask?” Jack said. “Find out what he’s gonna ask.”

Clara waited.

“How’s everythin’ been goin’?” Francis asked.

o o o

Clara lifted the bottle of white fluid from the phonograph table, where the Kate Smith record was scratching in its final groove, and drank. She shook her head as it went down, and the greasy, uncombed stringlets of her hair leaped like whips. Her eyes hung low in their sockets, a pair of collapsing moons. She recapped the bottle and then swigged her muscatel to drive out the taste. She dragged on her cigarette, then coughed and spat venomously into a wadded handkerchief she held in her fist.

“Things ain’t been goin’ too good for Clara,” Jack said, turning off the phonograph.

“I’m still trottin’,” Clara said.

“Well you look pretty good for a sick lady,” Francis said. “Look as good as usual to me.”

Clara smiled over the rim of her wineglass at Francis.

“Nobody,” said Helen, “asked how things are going for me, but I’ll tell you. They’re going just wonderful. Just wonderful.”

“She’s drunker than hell,” Francis said.

“Oh I’m loaded to the gills,” Helen said, giggling. “I can hardly walk.”

“You ain’t drunk even a nickel’s worth,” Jack said. “Franny’s the drunk one. You’re hopeless, right. Franny?”

“Helen’ll never amount to nothin’ if she stays with me,” Francis said.

“I always thought you were an intelligent man,” Jack said, and he swallowed half his wine, “but you can’t be, you can’t be.”

“You could be mistaken,” Helen said.

“Keep out of it,” Francis told her, and he hooked a thumb at her, facing Jack. “There’s enough right there to put you in the loony bin, just worryin’ about where she’s gonna live, where she’s gonna stay.”

“I think you could be a charmin’ man,” Jack said, “if you’d only get straight. You could have twenty dollars in your pocket at all times, make fifty, seventy-five a week, have a beautiful apartment with everything you want in it, all you want to drink, once you get straight.”

“I worked today up at the cemetery,” Francis said.

“Steady work?” asked Jack.

“Just today. Tomorrow I gotta see a fella needs some liftin’ done. The old back’s still tough enough.”